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| A Modern Portrait of an Ancient Route"Shadow of the Silk Road", by Colin Thubron, delivers a wonderful tale of his adventures along the Silk Road as it exists today. Indeed, the classic Silk Road of antiquity, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to Central China, can still be traced in many places. Thubron did just that, and "Shadow of the Silk Road" is the story of that adventure. Rather than follow the Silk Road as the Western world thinks of it, Thubron starts in Xian, China and travels west, terminating in Antakya, Turkey (Antioch). Furthermore, on the two places the Silk Road diverged onto alternate paths, Thubron chose to follow the lesser travelled routes. The net result of this journey is a fascinating portrait of Western China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Persian and Arabic lands. He takes a couple of interesting detours, including one into the fringes of Tibet. My only wish is that he took more time describing his time in Central Asia (the "Stans"). Instead, nearly half the book details his travels through Western China, which is eye-opening and enjoyable to read. If you are at all interested in these ancient places as they exist today - I recommend this book.
So the Silk Road's not what it was.If Thubron had just written a history, or even a work of fiction, on the cultures his journey passes through, I would I suspect have enjoyed it much more. His tale of backpacking today along these endless grimy roads sadly contains little of equal interest. His encounters and conversations add more or less nothing that is not familiar from generic westerner-wandering-around-the-middle-east works and the logistics of travel are less interesting still.
If the point of the book is to contrast a history, albeit romanticised, with a mundane present, I can't help but think that wasn't a particularly successful structure here.
Fans of Mr Thubron might enjoy this part of his personal journey, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking to read about the silk road, or its component parts today.
Great Parallel Between Silk Road: Past & Present"To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished..."
- Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road
In importance and influence, the new Silk Road may stand to rival its namesake. As with the old Silk Road, the new one will make some investors rich.
The old Silk Road was not even a road in the normal sense of that term. It was, as travel writer Colin Thubron describes it, "a shifting fretwork of arteries and veins, laid to the Mediterranean." Thubron recently covered 7,000 miles in eight months following the old trails of this fabled trade route.
The Silk Road ended, or began, in Antioch, Turkey. It stretched all the way to old Changan, or what is today known as Xian, in China. For a long time, it had no name. A German geographer coined the term "Silk Road" only in the 19th century.
Yet traffic along the Silk Road goes way back into the slipstream of humanity's past. Thubron writes: "Chinese silk from 1500 B.C. has turned up in tombs in north Afghanistan, and strands were discovered twisted into the hair of a 10th-century B.C. Egyptian mummy." Archeologists found silk dating from 1100 B.C. lying in the grave of a prince in Germany. The stuff got around.
The Silk Road carried much more than just silk across its rugged landscape. Back and forth went vegetables, fruits, furniture, artifacts of all kinds, musical instruments - even slaves. Even weapons. The crossbow, a Chinese invention, made its way across the old Silk Road to arm the Norman and Capetian kings in their battle with the dreaded English longbow at Crecy (in which they were famously defeated).
The old Silk Road seemed to embrace almost every national and ethnic group from Arabia to Japan - Persians, Turks, Sogdians, Syrians, Indians and many others. (Often called the greatest traders of the Silk Road, the Sogdians were an Iranian people. The Chinese believed them born traders. Myth held that "their mothers fed them sugar to honey their voices, and their baby palms were daubed with paste to attract profitable things," writes Thubron.)
There is a Silk Road revival, though, at least metaphorically. The old trading posts worked in storied cities such as Samarkand, Kashgar and Meshed. The new Silk Road weaves through Dubai, Riyadh, through Mumbai and Chennai in India, to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong - even as far as Tokyo.
Between 1995 and 2005 trade between these the Middle East and Asia increased fourfold, $59 billion to $300-500 billion by 2020. In his book, Thubron masterfully notes on his trip how the influence of the old Silk Road flowed into even remote hamlets. "The nervous system of the Silk Road radiated into the poorest extremities," he writes. "It traversed minor ecological divides, as well as empires." Likewise, this new surging trade between these regions will have ripple effects in the patterns of world trade and in financial markets everywhere.
Review by a writer for Agora Financial, publisher of economic and financial analysis including Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression, The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble, and I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.
Nothing Shadowy About this bookI loved this book. It felt as if I were traveling along with the author, seeing all the sights and sounds of a world I had little knowledge of. Also, the history of the area was most enlightening. Gave a copy of this to my grandson who will be traveling around in that part of the world for the next year. Also to his mother and wife so they could become informed as to the background of the country. I like to read about different cultures and countries and this was one of the best books I have read on that subject. -
Honest, sobering, account of a long journey's dangers & rewardsRetracing his youthful trek, this veteran travel writer charts conversations and shares sights. It starts off powerfully in Xian, at the start of the 7,000-mile route. Without photos, his narrative carries the force of a documentary film's record.
Rome at one end and China at the other, so distant, traded in legends. Silk grew on trees; "vegetable lambs" sprouted overnight cotton. A thousand years of commerce, ended by shipping, Mongol invasions, and alternate routes, left much of the settings he passes in ruins. Others, as in the PRC, obliterate whatever charm, devotion, or value remained. "To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, in a cloud of dust." (31)
He listens to many voices, fluent as he is in Mandarin & Russian. Thubron's strength is how he recounts the slow madness of a young wife who ran away before consummating her marriage, Persian men obsessed with female chastity and Western pornography, a shanghaied survivor of the Taliban and warlords, and polite resisters to Communist oppression or Islamic fundamentalism. The author's British identity marks him as target of entreaties opportunists, lonely men, drunken drivers, a Tibetan monk, eager students, and cunning informers, perhaps. He roams at a time when SARS threatens, and when the Iraqi invasion casts him as a representative, unwillingly, of a different type of inhumanity but one that links him to a long trail of such across the road taken by forces under Genghis Khan, the Shah, Khomeini's forces, Stalin, and the original Assassins.
He sums up on his second traverse of this trail what survives and what does not. The cliff temples of Matisi with a thousand miniature Buddhas as murals have been "defaced by Red Guards, each one scratched with an obliterating cross, as if it were a mathematical equation that hadn't worked out." (79) Near Khotan he tells, too fleetingly, of the strange Tocharian mummies with Celtic-like tartans and Caucasoid features in that desert climate. Among the rebellious Uighir, he feels apart: "Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. . . .Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable. You fear only your failure to understand or to reach where you are going. Sometimes you are moved by a kind of heartless curiousity, which shames you only on your return home. At other times you are touched, even torn; but you move on." (115)
As this traveler's tale continues, the lassitude and oddness of the journey weighs on him and you. He crosses the "shadow-line" as he flies over, given border tensions, the Kyrgyz-Russian-Chinese frontiers, "where the Chinese world elided with the Turkic-- where Uighir dreams simmered, and domes appeared, and people started to talk about God." (156) His stories of the Kyrgyz passes, full of drinking bouts, harrowing brushes with death, and near-pagan vistas of primeval rawness, linger. Tangerine slopes, apricot cliff, turquoise river, coal-black screes: these beckon a certain breed of native and a visitor able to recount their unworldly power. "Some mountains poured to the river in a liquid-seeming waste, the colour of sewage, while others showed crimson and incendiary beyond them, already daubed with snow." (180)
As he continues, paranoia seems to shadow him and his informants. The Chinese fearful of SARS and foreign presences monitor him; the peoples resisting the Communists or the Taliban, the mullahs or the despotic regimes fear his entrance or take him aside as a confidant. Past the ancient divide of the River Oxus, He in Mazar-e-Sharif watches from a hotel window "the still city, which seemed to be glimmering under water. I felt a light expectancy. This, I thought idly, was how people died: by mistake, imagining themselves bodiless." (221)
Such an existential unease grows as he enters Islamist territory. The Mongols left the places they conquered so ruined that even today, on this highway, forgetfulness appears to be the status quo, as it was for different ideologies but similar purposes under Stalin, Taliban, Mao, the Shah, and Khomeini. Nearing Iran: "For the last time I follow a track into a village and see again how people live. How a seven-year-drought is draining their fields, their crops, their lives. One quarter of their children never reaches the age of five. The average life ends at forty-three. Then all thoughts about brutality and conscience drain away, and the mystery becomes not cruelty, but compassion: why somebody offers a stranger a cigarette, or turns away from killing an enemy's son." (257)
In Tehran, he finds a clandestine humanism, but even a young filmmaker's search for genuine roots withers. He and some friends went one winter to a village to collect picturesque stories and scenes. Thubron quotes him: "But we found those villages had no memories. No stories. There were no lullabies they sang their babies. The songs they sang were the same as ours." (285) So, their film became: "About how there were no stories. How history had disappeared."
Thubron composes his book filled with such vignettes. He tells many stories even as he shows us how history crumbles and ideology stifles imagination. His book will not be the romantic travelogue that his predecessors might have labored a century or two ago to concoct. It can depress, and we may be startled as the author is by his own mirrored reflection late on, hostile eyes, windburned face, dissheveled attire. He makes no easy end of his journey, and his honesty may wear him and us down, but he is faithful in this manner to telling us what he heard, saw, and felt all the long way from the eerie, policed fastnesses of inner Asia to the calmer, tired shores of ancient Antioch.
Product Description To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.
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